Last tomato post… for now :)

This is that absolute last thing I am going to write about tomatoes… in 2013.

Last night, I was looking for a side dish and ran into the garden( which looks a bit threadbare except for the makeshift cold frames with greens in them. I wandered over to the last few tomato plants I have neglected to take down. There I found 6 chartreuse beauties. Jewels really, saying, “Have you forgotten about Fried Green Tomatoes?”.

I guess I had forgotten.  So I brought them in and washed them. Sliced and lightly salted them while I prepared my own beer batter. Some cornmeal, flour, baking powder , half bottle of beer, one egg, splash of water, some seasonings: salt, pepper, garlic, chili and paprika. It is always like when grandma cooks: I eyeball the amounts, the batter turns out pretty think due to the beer and baking powder.

At any rate fried those little treasures up and they were delicious. They were so surprisingly juicy, they reminded me of the deep-fried pickles at the fair. I was surprised because when I harvested them, those tomatoes were pretty firm.

So this afternoon, when I was looking for something to go on the side of my salad, I thought about these tasty treats!.

I heated them up in the toaster oven and had a few on the side of my salad. YUM!

Ecuador meets Italy , a version of sushi

My youngest daughter has always had her own ideas about food.  When she became lactose intolerant, she still loved yogurt.  She became a fan of rice milk. She adored green butter.

On her first and only trip to visit the mother country( Ecuador), she was 2 years old. We went to visit her great grand-parents and cousins and aunts. One weekend we spent at what the children named the “mountain House”. It was out of the city and looked to be in mountains but actually was in the Valley. Below the house is a steep trail that leads to a river( hence the idea that the house was in the mountains). My grandfather planted all sorts of trees on that property. He built a little caretaker.s house near the front. It was a cute crooked house , small in stature, and had a great view of a massive avocado tree, that had been nurtured for years.

There were other trees: grapefruit, lemon, tangerines, and a few apple trees. There were beautiful bougainvillea , roses, and many other blooming bushes and flowers.  The varieties of humming birds that came to visit were amazing. the house we stayed in looked as if it belonged somewhere in the Mediterranean. We found a little scorpion in it… my son was thrilled!

The mountain house is the place where the kids first had green butter. We had lovely fresh bread at breakfast. There was no butter. So I smeared some avocado on there( fresh off the tree) and my youngest said ” I want green butter on my bread. ” Since then she had enjoyed avocado amongst other delicious tropical foods.

She also loves Italian food , basically anything you can get at our local Italian deli. So one day her two favorite foods met: hard salami from Marchone’s deli and avocado. She loves sushi as well. She decided to roll like a California roll the avocado in the salami and her Ecuador-Italy roll was born.

She is now ten and this is currently one of her favorite snacks.

When she made her little roll, I was taken back to the first time she had avocado. It was a complete accident.